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Viewpoint Diversity in Higher Education
74 Plays9 months ago
Politicians, professors and pundits all seem to be talking about viewpoint diversity, and questioning whether it is a robust part of college and university life. But what does viewpoint diversity mean and how do we evaluate if it is alive and well on campus? Jon Shields, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, shares his take on why having a diversity of views in the classroom serves democracy and offers ideas for fostering a climate of open inquiry and intellectual pluralism.
Episode Resources:
- "Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues," Working Paper Draft, July 10, 2025, with Yuval Avnur and Stephanie Muravchik
- "Liberal Professors Can Rescue the GOP," New York Times, 23 March 2023
- “I’m a Conservative Professor Who Opposed Safe Spaces. I was Wrong.” New York Times, 7 April 2022
Recommended
Transcript
Principles of Free Speech and Justice
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I think what we need to do is explain how our principles of free speech, free inquiry, will help serve the cause of justice.
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The First Amendment, the constitutional freedom of speech and freedom of conscience that is the bulwark of our democracy.
Introduction to 'Speech Matters' Podcast
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There was a passion in what was being said, affirming this, what people consider it a sacred constitutional right, freedom of speech and freedom of association.
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From the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, this is Speech Matters, a podcast about expression, engagement, and democratic learning in higher education.
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I'm Michelle Deutschman, the Center's Executive Director and your host.
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During Speech Matters four seasons, we've touched on various aspects of diversity.
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The controversy over whether using diversity statements and faculty hiring is constitutional, as well as discussion about the sweeping number of legislative acts passed with the goal of eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in university classrooms and in extracurricular realms.
Viewpoint Diversity in Higher Education
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This month, we're going to look at diversity through a different lens, the kaleidoscope of viewpoint diversity in higher education.
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This phrase has been popping up everywhere.
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News headlines, legislation, the formation of centers, proposed settlements between the federal government and universities, the work of accreditors, the list goes on and on.
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Wherever this topic arises, emotional and deeply polarized views are typically not far behind.
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With the current administration raising concerns about educational echo chambers, potential liberal indoctrination of students, ideological homogeneity on the part of professors, and threatening to withhold federal funds if more perspectives are not represented, many in academia are reflecting on how did we get here?
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What does it mean to lack ideological diversity?
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How does it impact learning?
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And of course, how do we fix it?
Introduction of John Shields
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Luckily, today's guest, political scientist John Shields, has been thinking and writing about this topic for over a decade and is joining us to share his thoughts on how to answer these weighty questions.
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But before we dive in, let's turn to Class Notes, a look at what's making headlines.
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Since last month's class notes, a lot has happened.
Columbia University's Settlement with Trump Administration
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Right after we dropped episode seven, Columbia University became the first of several private universities to settle with the Trump administration.
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In a decision met with fury, defeat, and disillusionment on the part of stakeholders inside and outside of the New York campus, Columbia agreed to pay over 220 million in fines and penalties
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to resolve investigations into alleged violations of federal anti-discrimination laws related to handling of anti-Semitism on campus.
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While the settlement restored the vast majority of the federal funds frozen by the administration in March, Columbia is paying a price far beyond the fines.
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According to scholars at the Knight First Amendment Institute, the settlement narrows Columbia's autonomy with respect to admissions, the hiring and promotion of faculty and curriculum,
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all aspects of what the Supreme Court has called the essential freedoms of the university.
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The settlement also requires new rules relating to protest on campus and student discipline, realms that generally are and should be left to the discretion of the university rather than to the government.
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University of Pennsylvania and Brown University both followed suit soon after Columbia, and news outlets report that Harvard and the administration are also nearing the settlement.
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Emboldened by universities acquiescence, the Trump administration turned its attention to the University of California system and UCLA in particular.
UCLA and Threats to Research Funding
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Earlier this month, the administration froze over $500 million in research funds and then demanded that UCLA pay $1 billion to restore the frozen funding as well as contribute $172 million to a claims fund
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that would compensate victims of civil rights violations.
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On Monday, August 25th, the Los Angeles Times reported that top UC leaders, including UC Regents Board Chair Janet Reilly and UC President James B. Milligan are beginning talks with the Justice Department.
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The clock is ticking, given that the department announced that it is ready to sue if there is not reasonable certainty that the sides can reach an agreement by September
Supreme Court's Decision on Research Grants
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2nd.
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In other funding news, at the end of last week, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling allowing the Trump administration to cut off health research grants.
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It alleges advance diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts or promote gender ideology extremism.
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Justice Roberts joined the three liberal justices in dissent.
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While this ruling is not a final determination on whether terminating the grants is legal, it does mean that the administration can continue to withhold funds while the legal arguments
Policy Changes on Federal Work-Study Funds
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continue.
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To close out this month's class notes, I want to highlight the concerning Education Department Dear Colleague letter that went to the field last week.
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This guidance made an about-face concerning the use of federal work-study funds for voter outreach-related efforts by rescinding Biden-error guidance.
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Under the Biden administration's interpretation of federal statutes, federal work-study funds could be used for nonpartisan voter registration, voter assistance, at a polling place, or through a voter hotline, or serving as a poll worker.
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According to the Department of Education's latest interpretation, however, these activities can no longer be funded by federal work-study.
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Now back to today's guest.
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John A. Shields is a professor of American politics in the government department at Claremont McKenna College, where he has received the G. David Huntoon Senior Teaching Award, as well as the Distinguished Service Award.
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Shields is the author or co-author of four books on the American right, The Republican Civil War, What Lives Cheney's Wyoming, tells us about a divided American right, which is forthcoming, Trump's Democrats from 2020,
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Passing on the Right, Conservative Professors in the Progressive University from 2016, and The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right from 2009.
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John's work has also been published in a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Policy History, Political Science Quarterly, Critical Review, Contemporary Sociology, and the Journal of Church and State.
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In addition, his opinions have appeared in the pages of The Atlantic, Bulwark, The Chronicle of Higher Education,
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Los Angeles Times, New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times.
Interview with John Shields on Ideological Diversity
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This interview is aptly timed, given the recent release of a paper by John and others on college syllabi on contentious issues, which has been getting attention.
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I look forward to discussing that and many more issues.
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Welcome, Dr. Shields.
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We're so pleased that you could join us.
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I'm delighted to be here.
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Thanks for having me.
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And is it okay if I call you John?
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Please.
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Okay, so John, I think it would be good to do some table setting.
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You know, I think let's go to the basics, which is let's start with your conception of what you call it ideological diversity or viewpoint diversity, you know, and what does that term mean to you?
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And what makes it so critical for a liberal education?
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And I'll just clarify liberal meaning and approach to learning, right?
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Not a reference to politics.
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Yeah, great.
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Good question.
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Thanks again for having me.
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I would say that there are lots of intellectual currents that have profoundly shaped our intellectual world.
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And they include Marxist currents and Burkean ones, feminism, libertarian, liberal communitarian traditions.
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just to give a few examples.
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And I think it's important to teach authors and thinkers who've been shaped by these various traditions.
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It's important to have people in our university community who are aligned with these various traditions, partly just because they've had an outsized influence on our
Universities and Intellectual Traditions
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intellectual life.
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And so they matter.
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And I would also argue that they matter because there's wisdom in them.
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You know, I think it's partly why they
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endure and continue to attract different partisans.
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And I suspect most academics would agree with the proposition that we wouldn't want the university to be dominated by just one of these traditions.
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So as an ideal, it seems to me that the university should encompass the whole, right?
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It should be intellectually diverse.
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We want the university to be the university and not a sectarian institution.
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I think that's a great place to start.
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And I'm just going to dive in and sort of go into what a lot of people seem to have been kind of writing and saying, particularly in this moment, that this term viewpoint diversity, some people feel like has in many ways become code for political diversity or not enough conservative faculty, basically.
Decline of Conservative Professors
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Right.
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I think it's worthwhile to just share with the listeners the numerous studies that have illustrated the significant imbalance that we do see in the academy between faculty that identify themselves as liberal and those that identify as conservative.
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You talked about this in a 2018 piece, The Disappearing Conservative Professor.
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When you cite the Carnegie Foundation, that it had its survey in 1969, and at that point, 27% of faculty identified as conservative.
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And in that same survey, 30 years later, the percentage had dropped to 12%.
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And just last year, AEI referenced some work by Samuel Abrams at Sarah Lawrence, which illustrated this continuing move by faculty to the left, but with the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among students and citizens changing a little over the same time period.
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And I think it would be worthwhile for our listeners if you could share a little bit of the history of, you know, how did we get here?
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What forces have been at play to result in this imbalance, right?
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It just didn't occur.
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Yeah, it's a great question.
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And first I'd say, I mean, to your first point, I think it's true that
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viewpoint diversity has become code for this idea that there's just too many lefty professors in the university and there's not enough conservatives or center-right academics.
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And in some ways, I think that's unfortunate.
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I mean, I do think we need more intellectual pluralism and not always more conservative voices, although I think we need those too.
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I mean, I'll just give an example.
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Middle East studies is a field that
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has really been dominated for quite a few years by those who are pretty strongly anti-Zionist.
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And so what that field badly needs, it seems to me, are scholars who are skeptical of the field's dominant narratives and who engage them in thoughtful ways.
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And these thinkers need not necessarily be conservatives.
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They just need to be sort of in tension with, again, sort of the anti-Israel left.
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Or to give another example, I mean, many English departments are dominated by critical theory people.
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It would be good, it seems to me, if they were more pluralistic, if they hired more scholars who took different approaches to text.
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Again, I don't think they have to be conservative per se, even if they're going to be, in many cases, to the right of those who tend to dominate English departments.
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That said, I do think conservatives matter.
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You know, I think there's a rich conservative intellectual tradition that gets attenuated and weakened when we lose, when conservatives start to disappear from the professoriate.
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And you ask why they're declining.
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There is some evidence that
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that there's just sort of old fashioned discrimination against conservatives.
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I mean, there's quite a few surveys that show that at least a sizable minority of professors will just sort of say that they wouldn't hire a conservative or they'd be much less inclined to hire a conservative.
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So that's a real thing.
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That said, I've often said this and I think it's worth stressing.
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I don't think those prejudices which are real
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really explain the scarcity of conservatives in the professoriate.
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And that's because the truth is that there just aren't that many in the PhD pipeline.
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Most search committees don't, in many cases, they don't have an opportunity to even express their prejudices, should they have them, because there just aren't, again, that many
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conservatives getting PhDs these days, particularly in the social sciences and humanities.
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And then the question is why?
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You know, what's happening?
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Why aren't more conservatives getting PhDs?
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Why are they, you know, why are liberals and progressives and lefties much more drawn to the academy?
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And partly there's a sort of social class story, which we may get to later a little bit.
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I mean, conservatives are disappearing from the professional class just more broadly.
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You know, we have a diploma divide in this country after all.
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And so conservatives tend to be concentrated among Americans who are not highly educated.
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And that's a change from, you know, the 1960s and 70s, certainly.
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But it's also the case that of those conservatives who go to college, they often discover that they don't like their courses in the humanities and social sciences nearly as much as their liberal peers do.
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So when progressive students take their
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you know, as freshmen, they go to college and they take a survey course in sociology or history, they often discover that they want to take more of them.
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You know, they like those experiences, partly because I think those courses tend to be framed around progressive concerns and interpretations.
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And so that appeals to the, just the interest and sensibilities, I think, of young progressives.
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Conservatives, I think, have a different reaction.
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And I think
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to those same courses.
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And I think as the curriculum has become more politicized in a leftward direction, I think it's not surprising that conservatives decide they don't, you know, they just don't wanna take a lot of those courses that don't wanna major in the social sciences and humanities.
Conservative Students' Academic Choices
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It's a really interesting study of an elite liberal art college, and it was interested in predicting why some students picked one major over another.
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So it was trying to assess what led students to major in the social sciences versus, say, a STEM field.
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And it found that the political beliefs of students was the best predictor.
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So it found that conservative students really tracked overwhelmingly into STEM fields.
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And liberal students were much more likely to select into the humanities and the social sciences.
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And so lo and behold, of course, we find more conservative professors in STEM fields than we do in the natural sciences.
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And so I think this sorting process really starts very early.
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And then the last thing I'll say, I think the other big sort of structural factor that's driving this is that it's not really things the left is doing, it's things that the right is doing.
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You know, there's a lot of, I think, movement conservatives are pushing young conservatives away from the university, partly because they just see them as so unfriendly to conservatives that I think they...
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perhaps unintentionally, alienate young conservatives from the university.
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And, you know, my favorite example here is Charlie Kirk, who is the director of Turning Point USA, which is a big MAGA aligned organization that has lots of student chapters.
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And one thing Charlie Kirk is not doing is telling young conservatives to become professors.
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He's contemptuous of the university.
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He encourages them to be alienated and cynical.
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So I think that's another force that is driving these trends as well.
Conservative Organizations and Academia
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And so in conclusion, I'd say, you know, it's almost as if academics and Charlie Kirk are conspiring to keep the university the way it is and the way it's trending.
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That was really helpful.
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I appreciated that you looked at kind of a plurality of things that are happening because I think at least my experience has been that usually people are
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like you said, I'm finding they're picking one of those things as like sort of the explanation, right?
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And so therefore, if there's only one cause, then therefore there might be only one solution.
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And I think we are ultimately going to get to solutions.
00:16:53
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But I did want to spend just a little bit more time talking about, again, this movement from how we sort of ended up here, because you and Joshua Dunn wrote this groundbreaking book, which is now almost a decade ago.
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where you interviewed 153 professors and you talked about the experience of conservative professors in higher education.
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And I thought it would be interesting if you think it's valuable to kind of highlight some of the findings and then maybe contrast that with what is still the same and what has changed.
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And so therefore that can help us lead to here are some things that got us to the current moment and now what is it that we plan to do?
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Sure.
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Yeah, it's a good question.
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The book, yeah, the books, the book is aged a bit.
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I mean, so I'll say first a little bit about what we found at the time.
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One interesting finding is that conservative professors in the Maine are relatively, feel relatively at home in the university, despite their scarcity and low numbers, despite the leftward tilt of the university.
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And indeed, when we interviewed professors, we were struck that many said that they felt more at home in the university than the Republican Party, largely because of the growing influence of the populist right.
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And they didn't like that
00:18:15
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they didn't like right wing populism and felt alienated from it.
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And so one of the things that I think is just worth reminding listeners about conservative professors is that they tend, you know, they tend to be sort of anti-populist and they tend to see the dark side to democracy and feel some real sense of alienation from the Trumpist right, from the MAGA right.
00:18:42
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And so they felt, you know, mostly,
00:18:45
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Mostly they seem to be thriving and doing well in the university.
00:18:49
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That said, that may be true for a couple of reasons.
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You know, we also found that many of the professors we interviewed tended to conceal their politics, certainly before tenure.
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They kept their head down.
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It's also the case that they generally found their way into the safest spaces for conservatives in the university, which is to say that
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Most of the conservatives we interviewed avoided the most politicized disciplines and subfields.
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There's lots of like no go zones for conservatives, right?
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Or at least that's how they understood it, right?
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They found their way into places where they felt relatively welcome.
00:19:30
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So we found, for example, that there are a lot of conservative economists, of course, and there's a pretty good number of conservative political scientists.
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But there are very few conservative sociologists or historians or literature professors.
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We really struggled even to identify and find those folks.
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This resonates with my own story as well.
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I love sociology, which is why much of my work has a sociology cast to it.
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But I didn't become a sociologist because the discipline from top to bottom just seemed too politicized.
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So I just avoided it.
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And instead, I got a PhD in political science, not because I wanted to study the kinds of things that political scientists normally study.
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I didn't want to study the Congress or the presidency or
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You know, congressional law rolling seems terribly boring and depressing.
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But political science did create a kind of space, you know, did feel like a more tolerant space where I could do the kinds of things I was interested in doing.
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But in a different universe, in a world in which sociology was less politicized and
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I think less hostile to conservatives, I think I would have become a sociologist.
Political and Academic Changes Since Shields' Book
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You know, you also asked what's changed.
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And we did the interviews way back during Obama's second term.
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So I think we started doing them as far back as 2012.
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And so a lot's changed since those years.
00:21:11
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This was before the surge of left-wing identity politics.
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Actually, when we talked to conservative professors at the time, I don't think a single one expressed concern that their students couldn't speak up because of social anxiety or social repression.
00:21:30
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They weren't thinking about those things.
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They weren't thinking about cancel culture or talking about it.
00:21:36
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And we did these interviews also, of course, before Trump rose to power.
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I think one of the things that surprised me since the book came out is that there were more
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professors, conservative professors who are willing to defend Trump, or at least more than I would have predicted.
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You know, I thought maybe there'd be just a few.
00:21:57
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But, you know, it turns out that more conservative professors ended up coming around to Trump than I would have guessed.
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There's been some interesting work done by a sociologist by the name of David Schwartz at Boston University, and he just wrote a book on academic Trumpists.
00:22:16
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And, you know, he identified and found more of those folks than I would have guessed.
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They do tend to be concentrated in a few places like Hillsdale and the University of Dallas.
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And generally speaking, they're less professionalized than anti-Trump conservative professors, so they publish less and they're less integrated into their disciplines.
00:22:37
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But they're definitely, you know, more of those types than I would have predicted.
00:22:43
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But I guess the biggest thing that
00:22:46
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happened is, and this is much more recently, is that suddenly universities are more interested in hiring conservatives than they were, you know, certainly when we did our interviews back in, you know, more than 10 years ago.
00:23:04
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This is thanks in part to the new civic schools in red states, which are hiring conservatives.
00:23:11
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Partly it's because some of the other
00:23:14
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prestigious universities are talking about the need to hire some conservatives.
00:23:20
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So that's a big change.
00:23:21
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You know, suddenly it seems like maybe it's a good time to be a conservative professor.
Hiring Conservative Professors in Academia
00:23:27
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And, you know, my guess is that gives some of my conservatives, some of the conservatives we interviewed a sense of professional vertigo.
00:23:38
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It's very interesting because it's the kind of culmination of all kinds of different things.
00:23:43
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And I have two questions I want to ask.
00:23:46
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I think, and I don't want to forget the second one.
00:23:48
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I think I want to pull a little bit on what you've been talking about, about this sort of movement to hire more conservative-minded professors, whether that's through legislation, right?
00:23:58
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Right.
00:23:59
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state legislation that's mandating viewpoint diversity or, like you said, the establishment of certain centers of civic thought.
00:24:05
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But I think one of the things that's, I think, come to light is this increased attention and attempts to undermine certain other kinds of diversity, right?
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Diversity, equity, inclusion,
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in higher ed.
00:24:16
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And so we have some liberals largely that are arguing that despite the rights opposition to affirmative action and other sort of related policies that, you know, are they now borrowing from that playbook in order to recruit right-leaning faculty?
00:24:30
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And I'm wondering if you'd be able to sort of respond to what your thoughts are about that.
00:24:35
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Cause I think some people are sort of saying, Hey, we're looking at a little bit of hypocrisy here.
00:24:39
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Right.
00:24:41
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Yeah.
00:24:42
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It's a great question.
00:24:43
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I think there may be a sort of irony for both the left and the right here.
00:24:47
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One longstanding progressive argument for affirmative action says that education requires diversity of thought, right?
00:24:55
Speaker
That, after all, was the Supreme Court's original justification for affirmative action in the Bakke case back in 1977, right?
00:25:02
Speaker
It didn't rest...
00:25:07
Speaker
the constitutional justification for affirmative action on remedial justice.
00:25:12
Speaker
It justified affirmative action by this notion that universities need a diversity of voices.
00:25:18
Speaker
So if those liberal justices were right all along, if the primary purpose of affirmative action is to increase the variety of perspectives and voices
00:25:29
Speaker
then it seems to me there's no good ground to exclude conservative ones.
00:25:34
Speaker
It seems like conservatives would fit naturally into that liberal justification for affirmative action.
00:25:42
Speaker
Meanwhile, though, the right never liked that ruling, right?
00:25:47
Speaker
They were critics of Bakke.
00:25:49
Speaker
They argued for merit over social engineering.
00:25:53
Speaker
But now, as you suggest, some seem to be saying, well,
00:25:58
Speaker
Maybe those liberal justices in Bakke were right all along.
00:26:01
Speaker
You know, maybe maybe universities need to intentionally make make themselves more diverse so that they can fulfill their their their mission.
00:26:12
Speaker
In a way, they seem to be coming around.
00:26:15
Speaker
at least to the rationale that Bakke provided.
00:26:18
Speaker
I think there's always been hypocrisy around the question of diversity in higher ed.
00:26:25
Speaker
And so I think it's been a bipartisan, if there's hypocrisy, I think it's bipartisan.
00:26:32
Speaker
Personally, if you're asking me, I think various forms of diversity are important in higher education, right?
00:26:41
Speaker
We don't want campuses
00:26:43
Speaker
that don't have gender or racial or ethnic diversity.
00:26:48
Speaker
And I would also say that we don't want them to be without conservative thinkers either.
00:26:53
Speaker
But I do think it's worth reminding ourselves that these trends are going in somewhat different directions, right?
00:27:02
Speaker
That is, since the 60s, there's been a dramatic increase in gender and racial diversity in higher ed, thanks in part
00:27:13
Speaker
to the success of affirmative action.
00:27:16
Speaker
But over that same course of time, there are many fewer conservatives than there used to be, right, in the 1960s.
00:27:26
Speaker
At many top research universities, you know, I think we would struggle to find a single conservative professor.
00:27:36
Speaker
So I'd say in closing that I think, I mean, personally, I think that
00:27:42
Speaker
All these forms of pluralism matter and are important.
00:27:45
Speaker
But there's also the pivot to this concern about conservatives makes some sense given these divergent trends.
00:27:58
Speaker
Well, and maybe it's naive or idealistic of me to think, why does it need to be?
00:28:03
Speaker
It feels in this moment, very either or sort of of this binary as opposed to like, but and, right?
00:28:10
Speaker
That somehow just because there has been an increase in certain kinds of diversity since the sixties, right?
00:28:15
Speaker
Since the relationship seems to have been inverse, you know, why does that mean that one needs to be stopped while we further the other?
00:28:24
Speaker
I guess I would just distinguish.
00:28:26
Speaker
I agree with that basically.
00:28:29
Speaker
I mean, I think it's good to separate some of these things, right?
00:28:31
Speaker
So I would agree that these things shouldn't be either or and that universities have an interest in having a range of diversity,
Tensions Between Diversity and Inclusion
00:28:44
Speaker
right?
00:28:44
Speaker
And there's not a reason one can't both things simultaneously.
00:28:50
Speaker
I mean, I think the campaign against DEI is a little different
00:28:54
Speaker
In the sense that it's much less clear to me that the DEI is necessarily good for the university, at least some of the things that fall under the umbrella of DEI, which seem different from, to me at least, than just the goal of diversifying the faculty or diversifying the student body.
00:29:14
Speaker
No, I think that's absolutely fair because what is part of DEI is also a lot of hiring and programming and co-curricular and extracurricular.
00:29:23
Speaker
So I have a question and I'm almost a little bit embarrassed to ask it, but I'm going to ask it anyway, because I'm thinking if I have it, then maybe someone else has it, which is this idea of talking about almost as if someone needs to be conservative minded in order to teach conservative thinking and ideas.
00:29:41
Speaker
And I'm wondering if that's because
00:29:44
Speaker
people who let's say are more liberal minded and in some of these disciplines you've talked about are just not interested and therefore they're not teaching it or if it really is that you can, yeah, that's, you know what I'm saying?
00:29:55
Speaker
No, it's a great question and it's a smart question and I'm sympathetic actually.
00:30:02
Speaker
I mean, I do think that there's no good reason that non-conservatives can't teach conservative ideas.
00:30:08
Speaker
And in fact, I would say that given the scarcity of conservatives in the university,
00:30:13
Speaker
I think it's important that liberals do teach conservative ideas because there aren't conservatives around to teach
Teaching Conservative Ideas by Non-Conservatives
00:30:19
Speaker
them.
00:30:19
Speaker
So if our students are going to learn what's best and worthy of considering it in the conservative intellectual tradition, it seems to me that we need non-conservative professors to take an interest in that tradition and do it.
00:30:33
Speaker
And indeed, I just helped organize a workshop for
00:30:39
Speaker
faculty this last spring that was done through the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.
00:30:48
Speaker
And it was a program for faculty who were interested in teaching conservative political thought, but didn't really know very much about the tradition.
00:31:01
Speaker
And so one of the very gratifying things, actually, is that we got a number of faculty.
00:31:05
Speaker
We got quite a few faculty who came who were not conservatives at all, but just sort of thought it was a problem that there weren't many courses that taught conservative ideas in their college curriculum.
00:31:18
Speaker
So I agree with you.
00:31:22
Speaker
I do think, however, that traditionally conservative professors were sort of the custodians of this tradition.
00:31:30
Speaker
They were more interested in it and taught it more frequently, but also contributed to it.
00:31:38
Speaker
I mean, I think on the teaching side, you're right.
00:31:43
Speaker
Lots of non-conservatives should and can teach
00:31:48
Speaker
conservative ideas.
00:31:49
Speaker
But I also think we need conservative thinkers who are part of the university and contributing to the campus level conversations and also contributing, you know, conservative thought and ideas into their infusing that into, into, into research and scholarship as well.
00:32:10
Speaker
No, I think that is a really helpful point.
00:32:12
Speaker
I mean, because again, we all draw on our own experiences.
00:32:14
Speaker
So I was an adjunct professor at UCLA Law teaching this class on contemporary free exercise.
00:32:19
Speaker
So I felt like it was my responsibility, especially because most of the students in the seminar were left-leaning to absolutely represent the sort of conservative aspects of the judiciary, right?
00:32:32
Speaker
Right.
00:32:33
Speaker
But that is, I think, different than me writing about why I think that those decisions were the right ones or why that tradition is important.
00:32:43
Speaker
So I think that's an important distinction.
00:32:46
Speaker
And I think this is a good opportunity to talk about the paper.
00:32:50
Speaker
I have to say, I feel like no one will believe me, but I'm like, I invited John onto the podcast before he dropped his paper and I got all this press.
00:32:58
Speaker
But I'm
00:32:59
Speaker
I think it's really interesting, and I would love to kind of pull on this thread and then kind of maybe we can go from here into sort of what you've touched on before, which is the diploma divide.
00:33:09
Speaker
Because I think that all of these things have in common that, at least from my perspective, higher education is one of the key pillars of democracy, right?
00:33:17
Speaker
And democracy necessitates being able to think through complex and hard issues as people and citizens.
00:33:23
Speaker
So you have this working paper that you and Yuval Avner and Stephanie Moravchik released about a month ago.
College Syllabi and Scholarly Disagreement
00:33:30
Speaker
It's called Closed Classrooms, Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues.
00:33:34
Speaker
And the paper really leads by establishing that one of the main reasons we have universities is that they're integral to forming citizens.
00:33:43
Speaker
And then it examines critical texts that were assigned when discussing three different types of contentious issues.
00:33:49
Speaker
One was racial bias and American criminal justice.
00:33:52
Speaker
One was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and one was the ethics of abortion.
00:33:56
Speaker
So I'm wondering if you could share how you evaluated the celibate and what are some of the things you learned from doing so?
00:34:03
Speaker
Sure.
00:34:03
Speaker
Yeah, no, it was, thanks for asking about it.
00:34:06
Speaker
It was a really fascinating project for us.
00:34:10
Speaker
We didn't
00:34:11
Speaker
really know what we'd find when we dug into this database of millions.
00:34:17
Speaker
It has over 20 million syllabi.
00:34:19
Speaker
So it's an enormous database.
00:34:23
Speaker
And, and as you said, we were interested in how contentious issues are being taught.
00:34:30
Speaker
And to varying degrees, we found that the norm is to shield students from scholarly disagreement around these topics.
00:34:40
Speaker
So I'll give an example.
00:34:42
Speaker
We looked at Michelle Alexander's
00:34:44
Speaker
book, The New Jim Crow.
00:34:46
Speaker
It's an important book, obviously.
00:34:48
Speaker
It shows up thousands of times in the syllabus.
00:34:53
Speaker
It's one of the most assigned texts in the United States, as it should be, I would say, given its significance, given its influence on Black Lives Matter.
00:35:04
Speaker
It's a book I've taught.
00:35:05
Speaker
It's a book many of my colleagues have taught.
00:35:09
Speaker
Students should read it and reckon with its arguments.
00:35:13
Speaker
But there's also been a lot of criticism of this book.
00:35:17
Speaker
And when I say criticism, I don't mean criticism from
00:35:20
Speaker
you know, the movement right.
00:35:21
Speaker
Obviously, that's been, that's the case.
00:35:24
Speaker
But it's been criticized as well by scholars and academics who are actually not, in fact, conservatives, but just disagree with some of the major claims she makes in the book.
00:35:39
Speaker
And some are really heavy hitters.
00:35:41
Speaker
You know, one critic is James Forman Jr. He's author of Locking Up Our Own.
00:35:48
Speaker
Locking Up Our Own is a book that
00:35:50
Speaker
you know, won the Pulitzer.
00:35:52
Speaker
And he doesn't disagree with the whole, all of Alexander's book.
00:35:56
Speaker
You know, he agrees that our criminal justice system is draconian, but he doesn't think we're living under a new Jim Crow.
00:36:04
Speaker
And in part, he doesn't think that because he argues that black citizens and politicians push themselves for tough on crime policy policies in the 70s and in the 1980s.
00:36:17
Speaker
So we looked at the extent to which critics like this, critics like Foreman,
00:36:23
Speaker
We looked at the extent to which they're paired with and taught with Michelle's book.
00:36:28
Speaker
And what we found is that there's a very small group of professors who teach these controversies, but they're the exception to the rule.
00:36:37
Speaker
In the vast majority of cases, academics assign the new Jim Crow, but they don't assign any of the critics.
00:36:42
Speaker
Instead, they assign a lot of books that tend to reinforce the arguments in the new Jim Crow.
00:36:49
Speaker
You know, we argue that this is just a really a missed opportunity and really unfortunate because college should help young people understand the problems and the controversies that shape our public life.
00:37:02
Speaker
They should help young people understand the complexity of our political challenges and social issues so that they can become informed citizens, so that they can become better activists, so that they can become responsible leaders.
00:37:20
Speaker
But that's it seems to be not happening for the most part.
00:37:24
Speaker
And so that in short is what we found.
00:37:27
Speaker
You know, we found it in the other issues as well.
00:37:30
Speaker
We found it in the case of Israel and Palestine, and we found it to a large extent, too, in the ethics of abortion.
00:37:37
Speaker
In any case, I'm happy to say more about the paper if you want to dig into it.
00:37:40
Speaker
But that's a kind of general overview of what we found.
00:37:43
Speaker
Okay.
00:37:44
Speaker
No, I have a couple of follow-ups.
00:37:45
Speaker
So one was in all three cases, did you find the same in that the left-leaning books were assigned regularly without the critiques, not that the critiques are right-leaning, or was there any mix of there might've been the opposite?
00:38:01
Speaker
Very little.
00:38:02
Speaker
I mean, there was, we really looked for this because it's a really good question that you're asking here, right?
00:38:08
Speaker
You're asking like, was there
00:38:10
Speaker
Was there like some group of conservative professors just teaching some other orthodoxy?
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:16
Speaker
Or even a group of a class that's about abortion ethics that could focus.
00:38:20
Speaker
I mean, there's so many things you could focus on ethically that one would consider like anti-abortion, right?
00:38:26
Speaker
I mean, from a religious perspective, from a medical perspective.
00:38:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:31
Speaker
I mean, generally what we found is that for those who assigned the critics, so like, for example,
00:38:37
Speaker
For professors who assign James Forman's Locking Up Our Own, they almost invariably assign Michelle Alexander.
00:38:44
Speaker
So it's not like they don't have to do that, right?
00:38:46
Speaker
They could have just stacked it with lots of critiques of Alexander's thesis, right?
00:38:52
Speaker
Or people in that space.
00:38:55
Speaker
So that suggests to me that there is this minority of professors who really do teach the controversy.
00:39:02
Speaker
Now, in the case of abortion, we did find one pro-life book that, you know, is by Francis Beckwith.
00:39:09
Speaker
He's a serious, you know, he's a serious philosopher.
00:39:14
Speaker
He engages in a thoughtful way a lot of the pro-choice philosophers.
00:39:19
Speaker
It turns out that those who assign Beckwith's book, though, tend not to include pro-choice voices.
00:39:25
Speaker
But it's a very small number of cases, you know, like, I mean, we're talking a couple handful of syllabi.
00:39:32
Speaker
mostly in really conservative Christian institutions.
00:39:36
Speaker
I do think that this is happening on the right in very sectarian kinds of institutions.
00:39:43
Speaker
I think what's troubling, though, is we don't want our great universities to mirror what the sectarian education that's happening in our most religious and conservative institutions.
Indoctrination vs. Education
00:39:59
Speaker
That seems just troubling to me.
00:40:02
Speaker
I would agree with that.
00:40:03
Speaker
So I mean, I think now I'm going to get to, not that it's the million dollar question, but of course, this question of sort of why.
00:40:08
Speaker
And I want to bring up one of the kind of words that comes up whenever anyone talks about sort of viewpoint diversity, which is this idea of indoctrination, right?
00:40:17
Speaker
There are many people who posit, right, that this is all about left-leaning professors being more interested in indoctrinating students to specific ideologies than teaching them.
00:40:27
Speaker
And
00:40:27
Speaker
My personal view is I have a hard time imagining that's really what's necessarily at work across the board, but you're the one that has done the actual study.
00:40:37
Speaker
And I'm curious if you have any, if by going through what you've gone through, you were able to shed light on the why of it, because of course, then the next piece becomes the, all right, so how do we, you know,
00:40:51
Speaker
It changes so that syllabi and the way classroom discussions and contentions issues are structured differently.
00:40:58
Speaker
Yeah, the why is hard for us to discern.
00:41:01
Speaker
You know, it's not the, we can't shed much empirical light on that question based on the research we've done thus far.
00:41:08
Speaker
We can speculate a little.
00:41:11
Speaker
I do think in some cases, it may be that professors just are teaching topics outside of their expertise.
00:41:20
Speaker
They don't always know what the literature and debates look like in those areas.
00:41:25
Speaker
So for example, you know, we found a good number of professors who were teaching the new Jim Crow who were in literature, who were doing it through literature courses, right?
00:41:35
Speaker
And, you know, and so it's possible that a lot of these professors just don't know very much about the broader debates, scholarly debates, right?
00:41:47
Speaker
about the criminal justice system, because it's sort of outside their expertise.
00:41:52
Speaker
So that may be happening for some folks.
00:41:54
Speaker
But I also think that there's probably some slice of this world too that just has a different understanding of the relationship between education and liberal democracy.
Good Civic Education in Universities
00:42:08
Speaker
You know, and maybe we even just have different understanding.
00:42:11
Speaker
Maybe what's a tension here, actually, Michelle, is just like we just have different understandings of what like good civic education is.
00:42:16
Speaker
You know, I mean, there may be professors, for example, who just think like, you know, good.
00:42:21
Speaker
They may they may think that good professors should, you know, inspire their students to.
00:42:27
Speaker
to be change agents and that that requires them to expose them to the world's injustices and so you know they they're they're drawn to to books uh that do that and aren't particularly interested in the critiques of those perspectives right and so
00:42:49
Speaker
I don't know.
00:42:49
Speaker
And maybe the debate we just need to have in the university is what is our role as professors?
00:42:56
Speaker
You know, what is the relationship between the university and liberal democracy?
00:43:02
Speaker
And maybe we just have fundamentally different, you know, really different understandings of what that relationship should look like.
00:43:11
Speaker
I literally had just written down this question, what is the goal of liberal education, right?
00:43:16
Speaker
So maybe the conversation isn't about which viewpoints and how diverse they are, but what are these viewpoints in service of?
00:43:24
Speaker
And one more thing I'd want to ask before I then ultimately get again to, I do want to get back to the diploma divide, because I think
00:43:32
Speaker
Part of what's happening now is we have the things that are going on internally in the university, and then we have the things that are going on externally, and then we have how are those things interacting with each other.
00:43:42
Speaker
Right.
00:43:42
Speaker
But I did want to spend a moment just talking about this question or issue of contentious conversations in the classroom.
00:43:48
Speaker
And, you know, different people feel differently about the word safe space or welcoming space, but I hope you understand what I'm trying to get at, right?
00:43:56
Speaker
Which is this idea that when we're going to expose...
Norms for Engaging Contentious Topics
00:43:59
Speaker
students to viewpoints that may make them feel uncomfortable, which by the way, is a really important part of education.
00:44:04
Speaker
You know, how does one go about doing that?
00:44:06
Speaker
And I was really taken with this piece you wrote in 2022 about, you said, I'm a conservative professor who opposed safe spaces.
00:44:13
Speaker
I was wrong.
00:44:14
Speaker
And you spend a lot of time talking about this framework
00:44:17
Speaker
for establishing classroom norms when preparing to engage in contentious conversations.
00:44:22
Speaker
And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that, because I do think this issue is so layered, right?
00:44:27
Speaker
The layering is like, are there enough diversity of viewpoints?
00:44:31
Speaker
Yes, no, maybe.
00:44:32
Speaker
Then it's like, okay, how do we get more viewpoint diversity in the classroom?
00:44:36
Speaker
But then there's the actual, okay, once we have the syllabus that actually potentially looks right, how do we actually have that take place in a robust, engaging way where people can come away feeling better?
00:44:52
Speaker
I don't know if you want to say if it's good or if it's just, yeah.
00:44:56
Speaker
Sure.
00:44:56
Speaker
I mean, I'll talk just generally about that piece a little bit.
00:44:59
Speaker
I mean, I would place myself on the center right, which generally means I'm broadly speaking in the
00:45:08
Speaker
free speech camp.
00:45:10
Speaker
That means I don't, you know, I didn't particularly like the censorious culture, which has grown on college campuses over the past decade or so.
00:45:20
Speaker
I do think it was harmful to liberal education.
00:45:23
Speaker
On the other hand, I'm sometimes alienated by the free speech camp as well, partly because it has a tendency to think a lot about our rights and freedoms.
00:45:35
Speaker
and not much at all about the culture that makes the pursuit of truth possible.
00:45:41
Speaker
And much less about the possibility that that free speech culture might include norms of restraint and not just norms of free expression.
00:45:51
Speaker
So for example, if my colleague says something that I suspect is racist or anti-Semitic or bigoted in some way,
00:46:03
Speaker
I could tell them that, you know, I might be saying something that's true.
00:46:09
Speaker
Maybe they are really are a bigot.
00:46:11
Speaker
I'd be exercising my freedom of speech.
00:46:14
Speaker
But if I did, you know, they might retreat from the discussion that we're having.
00:46:20
Speaker
Right.
00:46:20
Speaker
And they might repress their sincere beliefs and
00:46:25
Speaker
when whatever topic we're talking about comes up again.
00:46:29
Speaker
So in those cases, I think restraint is important.
00:46:32
Speaker
I think it's better just to, in those kinds of cases, to push back against the claims that they're making.
00:46:39
Speaker
and hope the conversation moves forward.
00:46:41
Speaker
So there's an example where the suppression of speech advances truth-seeking.
00:46:48
Speaker
In that New York Times piece, I make a distinction between self-censorship and self-restraint.
00:46:54
Speaker
And self-censorship, I think, is something that happens under the shadow of coercion.
00:47:00
Speaker
It happens when we don't express our genuine thoughts because we fear someone might punish us or harm us in some way.
00:47:09
Speaker
Self-restraint though is different, I think.
00:47:11
Speaker
It's something that happens more or less through the free agreement of a community, essentially through collective norms that help civilize and domesticate our conversations.
00:47:22
Speaker
So to your question about the classroom, I encourage my students to engage ideas without assuming bad faith.
00:47:31
Speaker
I encourage them to embrace a norm of charity in the classroom.
00:47:37
Speaker
And also be restrained by that norm when they leave the classroom, right?
00:47:41
Speaker
So I don't want them to go out and call their classmates something vile on social media, for example.
00:47:47
Speaker
And I think these
00:47:48
Speaker
Norms of restraint help students speak up in ways that help us collectively pursue the truth.
Self-Restraint in Academic Discussions
00:47:56
Speaker
So I guess in short, you know, I think advocates for free speech need to think more deeply about the kind of culture that facilitates truth-seeking, particularly in college classrooms.
00:48:09
Speaker
Well, I could not agree more with that.
00:48:12
Speaker
I think it's not just something that you want to inculcate in college students, but as I think about raising my own children, right?
00:48:20
Speaker
I mean, this is a skill that we teach people, which is that we don't always say everything that is on our mind for many different reasons, right?
00:48:29
Speaker
Right.
00:48:30
Speaker
Right.
00:48:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:31
Speaker
And there's a culture of transgression, right?
00:48:34
Speaker
that's always been powerful in the culture.
00:48:37
Speaker
I mean, I think it's sort of moved from left to right in recent decades.
00:48:41
Speaker
I mean, you see it, the culture of transgression was always, I think, powerful on certain parts of the left, but I think it's really moved to the right.
Trump's Influence on Speech Norms
00:48:50
Speaker
I mean, Trump is a great example of this.
00:48:52
Speaker
Trump doesn't respect any speech norms.
00:48:56
Speaker
And I think on the whole, that's been bad for democracy.
00:49:01
Speaker
I would concur.
00:49:02
Speaker
And I think that's a good lead-in to sort of zoom a little bit out of sort of the classroom and sort of, you know, the university and to think a little bit about how, what the interplay between our higher education system is, you know, and democracy and democracy.
00:49:19
Speaker
Certainly a phenomenon that people have been making note of in the last bunch of years is what you and I both refer to as the diploma divide.
00:49:28
Speaker
And I just, for the purposes of our listeners, I want to make sure people know really what we're talking about, which is that Pew Research did a study of voting habits from last year's presidential election, and that showed that voters were sharply divided by whether they have a college degree.
00:49:45
Speaker
So voters with a four year degree or more constitute about 40% of all voters favored Harris by double digits, 16 percentage points,
00:49:54
Speaker
while those with a college degree favored Trump by nearly as much, so 14
Diploma Divide and Political Diversity
00:49:59
Speaker
points.
00:49:59
Speaker
And then voters with postgraduate degrees showed an even stronger Democratic preference favoring Democratic candidates by roughly two to one.
00:50:07
Speaker
And so I guess one of my questions is, is there a relationship between voting habits among college educated voters and the dearth of conservative professors in academia?
00:50:17
Speaker
Well, I think if it's not, you know, the diploma divide is relatively new.
00:50:22
Speaker
And so I do think it's, it doesn't explain the gradual sort of erosion of conservative professors since the 1990s.
00:50:31
Speaker
But I do think, I very much do think it, it doesn't portend well for the future, right?
00:50:39
Speaker
It's just another development that, you know, it'll certainly affect the pipeline down, down the road.
00:50:47
Speaker
And I'd say, you know, this is,
00:50:49
Speaker
it's a democratic challenge, right?
00:50:51
Speaker
The professional class as a whole, I'd say, has become much more progressive.
00:50:57
Speaker
And indeed, I'd even say that liberalism has become a sort of badge of class membership.
00:51:03
Speaker
You know, it's a way of signaling one's belonging to a social class.
00:51:07
Speaker
That's a powerful force.
00:51:09
Speaker
We all want to belong to our social class.
00:51:11
Speaker
And so, but there might be another implication to this that circles back to an earlier conversation we had about affirmative action.
00:51:19
Speaker
right?
00:51:19
Speaker
If we want to find more conservatives in PhD programs down the road, maybe we better practice class-based affirmative action because that's where the conservative students are going to come from.
00:51:31
Speaker
So yeah, I think this is, the diploma divide is troubling development for a lot of reasons, but it certainly doesn't help, certainly won't improve political diversity among the professoriate down the road, that's for sure.
Incentivizing Teaching and Diversity
00:51:44
Speaker
And I think talking about the future is sort of, I think, where the best
00:51:49
Speaker
place for us to sort of end, even though it could be the beginning of a totally separate conversation, which is that, you know, I would be remiss if I didn't know, right, the unprecedented assault on higher education right now, especially from the executive branch.
00:52:02
Speaker
And sort of taking the things that we've spoken about and then adding that into consideration, it seems that there are very many obstacles.
00:52:11
Speaker
And so obviously you don't have all the answers, but if you were going to highlight a couple of things that people
00:52:16
Speaker
might be doing in this moment or in the short term to address what we've talked about, you know, what might those things be?
00:52:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:25
Speaker
What can we do?
00:52:27
Speaker
Yes.
00:52:27
Speaker
What can we do?
00:52:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:29
Speaker
Well, I think one great virtue of American universities and colleges is that they're the best in the world and we continue to remake them.
Optimism for University Reforms
00:52:40
Speaker
They continue to experiment.
00:52:42
Speaker
So I, you know, despite all the challenges in front of us, I think there is cause to be optimistic.
00:52:49
Speaker
A lot could be done here.
00:52:51
Speaker
I guess I would agree with my colleague, John Zimmerman, who teaches education history at the University of Pennsylvania.
00:52:58
Speaker
And John always stresses that we need to somehow incentivize better teaching, you know, and I do think he's
00:53:09
Speaker
write about that.
00:53:10
Speaker
And that might include offering generous course development grants for professors who want to teach scholarly controversies on contentious topics and remedy some of the problems that we identify in our paper.
00:53:24
Speaker
We might modify the way we evaluate departments and attend more to teaching than we do in those evaluations.
00:53:35
Speaker
I do think there's also opportunities to build more institutions within universities that might diversify the professoriate and the curriculum.
00:53:46
Speaker
I think there's different models for doing this.
00:53:48
Speaker
And I'm very encouraged to see the experimentation that's happening.
00:53:53
Speaker
You know, Johns Hopkins University, for example, started the Agora Institute, which is, you know, concerned about civics and pluralism and viewpoint diversity.
00:54:04
Speaker
Then there's older institutions, which are being reformed in interesting ways.
00:54:08
Speaker
You know, Hoover Institution at Stanford is now...
00:54:12
Speaker
I think some of its scholars are teaching undergraduates at Stanford.
00:54:16
Speaker
So that think tank is being integrated into the life of the undergraduate college more.
00:54:21
Speaker
So I think despite the difficulty of our moment, which is admittedly bad, you know, you mentioned, you know, the current White House.
00:54:30
Speaker
That's a serious problem, obviously.
00:54:33
Speaker
At the same time, again, you know, it just seems to me that there's a lot of new initiatives at foot.
00:54:39
Speaker
And it feels, this is cliche, but it feels like the best and the worst of times, you know, like it's the Trump administration is raining hellfire on universities.
00:54:49
Speaker
At the same time, there's a lot of reform initiatives afoot, and I'm optimistic about those.
Conclusion on Intellectual Diversity
00:54:55
Speaker
Well, I think that's a great note to end on.
00:54:56
Speaker
I feel like a lot of people just say it's the worst of times.
00:54:59
Speaker
So if you think it's both the best and the worst, then that's great.
00:55:02
Speaker
And, you know, it's true that, you know, Johns Hopkins also started that partnership with, you know, AEI, was at that Civic Thought Conference.
00:55:10
Speaker
And I feel like we've covered a lot.
00:55:12
Speaker
There's more to talk about.
00:55:13
Speaker
But is there anything else that you would like to say that perhaps we missed or that you feel like you would like to add?
00:55:19
Speaker
No, just to thank you.
00:55:20
Speaker
It's been a delight to be on the program and I appreciate it.
00:55:25
Speaker
Well, I appreciate willingness and I am really hopeful that this will give some people who might not have been as open to sort of the different perspectives on this particular issue and opportunity to think about it from some different vantage points.
00:55:42
Speaker
And I sort of think of learning as a kaleidoscope, right?
00:55:45
Speaker
And so it looks different when we look through different lenses.
00:55:48
Speaker
So thanks for bringing your academic and intellectual lens to Speech Matters.
00:55:52
Speaker
Thanks.
00:55:53
Speaker
That's a wrap.
00:55:55
Speaker
Thanks again to Dr. John Shields for joining us.
00:55:58
Speaker
Next month, we are honored to be joined by the former United States National Archivist, Dr. Colleen Shogun.
00:56:04
Speaker
Dr. Shogun will talk with us about civic education to mark Constitution Day, which is celebrated September 17th.
00:56:11
Speaker
We'll talk to you then.